January 14, 2014

Analytics of a Failed Start-up

The company Everix opened in 2011 and it targeted "the Photo Mess", something I have in my digital lifestyle. I have very valuable photo collections but they span five hard drives and three cloud services. Everpix offered to help me solve my digital clutter and its startup engineering pulled down $2.3M in angel and VC funding. The money didn't stretch far enough.

According to the Everpix team, "After two years of research and product development, and although having a very enthusiastic user base of early adopters combined with strong PR momentum, we didn't succeed in raising our Series A in the highly competitive VC funding market. Unable to continue operating our business, we had to announce our upcoming shutdown on November 5th, 2013".

But there's more--much more--because Everpix released a very powerful set of metrics that all start-ups could leverage.

High-Level Start-up Metrics

At the time of its shutdown announcement, the Everpix platform had 50,000 signed up users (including 7,000 subscribers) with 400 millions photos imported, while generating subscription sales of $40,000 / month during the last 3 months (i.e. enough money to cover variable costs, but not the fixed costs of the business).

Everpix shared its high-level metrics from September 2012, with the launch of paid subscriptions, to October 2013, the last month before the Everpix shutdown announcement. This is a significant dataset of hundreds of files covering all aspects of business. This rare and uncensored inside look at the internals of a startup will benefit the startup community.

Here are some example of common startup questions this Github dataset helps answering:

What are investment terms for consecutive convertible notes and an equity seed round? What does the end cap table look like? (see here)

How does a Silicon Valley startup spend its raised money during 2 years? (see here)

The metrics in the dataset were "frozen" as of November 6th, 2013 (the day following the announcement of Everpix's shutdown) and represent more than 90% of all available Everpix metrics. Only metrics covered by NDAs with partners or metrics exposing identifiable Everpix users information have been omitted.